The Freedom Manifesto – Karan Bajaj – Review

Going through Karan’s career journey, it’s clear that he is someone with an exceptional energy level and always needed a place to expand, a sense of comfort seems to give him restlessness. Given Karan’s insane risk-taking appetite, his story should ideally not trigger a content individual on a pre-defined corporate ladder. With that caveat setup upfront, let me provide an overview of Karan’s freedom manifesto.

The book is divided into two parts, the first one deals with a framework on how to position oneself for the entrepreneurship journey. He provides formula for the amount of corpus fund required to sustain a desirable lifestyle, investing rules that provides a broad structure to breakup income towards needs and experience based expense bucket while the rest gets into savings bucket, 1:1:1 daily process of dedicating 3 hours of life to self-improvement focusing on exercise, meditation and reflection and a broad understanding into which business idea provides maximum impact. It’s also important to understand the failure rate and Karan provides key stats that shocks the reader with the supremely skewed success vs failure ratio for a startup, needless to state that it's skewed towards failure. 

The second part provides a starter tool kit elucidates into what needs to be done for tech related product based company from seed stage to exit. There are questions pertaining to the significance of a co-founder and in which situations it’s better to do without one. Karan provides insights on what persona of leaders in different disciplines within the firm adds value and who needs to be avoided. Finally, there are invaluable information with respect to venture capital community and structure to prepare an appropriate pitch deck.

At various points in the book, he has also given details of people who helped in the professional journey and elevated the quality. For instance, I liked the suggestion of using the services of Slide marvels, who were professional presentation design company, on a quick review there is clear evidence that they can transition a normal powerpoint into a creatively superior slide.  

On the flip side, seed to exit in 18 month’s timeframe can be called out as an exaggeration since the timing of venture helped his cause to a great extent. When lockdown was announced in March 2020, it’s bound to have provided an extraordinary uplift into any firm that focused on ed tech business.

Over the course of the book, there were a few statements made by Karan that resonate with.

“The best people generate insane amount of value, 10% of high performers generate 90% of the startup output.”

“Choose life experience over bank balance. Personal and financial growth has a near perfect correlation over the long term.”

I must admit that Karan has written the book with a lot of earnestness and intent to help aspiring entrepreneurs.